Adventures in systems land

I posted this as a response to some of the very short sighted comments and rant going on over on PoguesPosts, the latest in Technology from NY Times reporter/columnist David Pogue. The topic was about replacing a broken screen on an iPhone and the $245 cost.

Universally though both David and all 108 posters before me seemed to completely miss is the opportunity to do things better, not to gripe about Apples costs, or the poor or otherwise design of the iPhone. So, here’s my take on it.

“I think the point is that we and the companies that we buy from, HAVE to start being much more responsible with our electronic goods from the point of design.

Is it unreasonable to expect the designers of one of the best gadgets in the last few years to think about how they are serviced, refurbished and disposed of, I think not.

We simply can’t go on forever buying stuff and dumping the old, unwanted broken stuff without regard. The designers have their part to play in this, as do the companies that sell us stuff. Why didn’t the designers expect to see a reasonable amount of broken screens? Why isn’t there a reasonably priced refurbishment program that replaces the outer case, scratched glass etc.

This is an important challenge and one we all need to rise to. It is simply not good enough to just keep dumping old electronic devices with no regard to where the raw materials, components for the next one come from, and where the waste goes from the last one.

Shame on Apple for not making it easier to replace a broken screen, shame on Apple for not providing a more cost effective repair service.”

{Edit: What really made me think of reposting this was because when I read the posted version(uneditable) I realised I’d missed a vital NO in “no regard” in the 2nd from last paragraph.}

Newtons 3rd law of motion is in essence “for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction”.

When x86 and rack systems couldn’t scale up to handle the demands of modern computing, they scaled out. Scale out systems are OK to a point, but soon the complexity and cost of scale out becomes a real hurdle and building plumbing isn’t what most businesses want to pay their employees to do.

The IBM reaction to this has been the recent announcement of two super-dense systems. These are server consolidation platforms on steroids. Earlier this month we announced the new POWER6 “Hydro-Cluster” supercomputer, the Power 575, which has upto 448 processor cores per rack. Today see’s the press announcement of the IBM iDataplex server, an x86-based super-dense server.

In case the benefits of a super-dense system are not obvious, the weekends mysterious video has re-appeared on YouTube. iDataplex is currently a custom build offering rather than a product, and can be built with a range of different cores and boards to suit the application from low power, low heat to high function high power.

The press release on iDataplex is here and the video here.

I never really got casual Friday. Here at IBM, Friday pm is Think Friday, no repetitive meetings, time to think and urgent meetings only. Yep, I wear my jeans in on Fridays and try to catch up on email, not much time to think. Casual Friday for me though is more than clothes, it’s a state of mind thing for me, that stems back to my time at Chemical Bank out on Long Island, NY in the early 1980’s.

When we started at the data center, the place was still a building site and we wore what we liked. Over the next 15-months though things quietened down, other people started working in the office and a bunch of mid-20’s mainframe geeks with t-shirts, sometimes shorts etc. stuck out a bit for a bank. Then the day came, my boss, Phil Gross, pointed out we were possibly amongst the highest paid people in the building, we were paid to think smart, and so we should dress smart. From then on it was back to normal shirt/tie etc, apart from the twice yearly lobster parties in the parking lot. One day perhaps we’ll get John McNic to start a web site with pictures, hopefully I’ll be retired by then…

So now we have chinposin Friday. If you are on twitter or flickr, post a picture that reflects you in a chinposin mood. This week I’ve been reflecting on my past and my future, so this chin pose is a good summary. Great fun, pretty simple, some people have been doing very funny things! Here’s to chinposin.

[Edit: Jan/8/2008. Removed graphic, you can see it here.]

I’ll be posting at least on one topic over the holidays, although a few have got me sparked up, @monkchips post on Erlang and why Amazon doesn’t need IBM, at least.

Not sure how much access to my ibm email I’ll have. I’m heading back to Europe today with four laptops, this one, the two I’ve been using for grid and web services development, and my prior IBM UK laptop. Turns out they want them all back.

Taking four laptops through security was fun! If you need to get in touch urgently either contact me through Twitter, or use google to find my personal email address. It’s not hard but I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader.

Credit jalaj who posted this workaround to get wordpress based blogs verified for Google Webmaster tools. His blog entry is here.

The first one didn’t work, here is a another trackback

I’ve posted two trackbacks this week to non-WordPress blogs and neither showed up. This is a test to see if they show up here…

After some intense work on a couple of key futures projects, one on SOA and System p; the other on processor threading architectures; I had a couple of minutes today to catch-up with some of my RSS feeds before heading out the door and catching the last flight up to NY for the annual IBM STG Senior Leadership meeting.

Two things in the feed list grabbed my attention, both from RedMonk, although one from the self-appointed RedNun(dangerously close to something I grew to loathe in the seventies, Blue Nun, but that’s another story).

First, James Governor “outed” me and my new business cards on the Mainframe blog. I didn’t so much the resent the outing, I think it was the notion that I’d gone from zSeries to System p that hurt. I never saw it that way, I’ve just come over to System p to do a job, it’s just technology mate.

Then I read Annes’ useful piece on Open Source ESBs and Decentralised SOA development. For an op.ed piece I’m with this entirely and not about to leap to defend the usual suspects. However, reading it I just couldn’t get past the words “decentralised” and “distributed”. In IT these are emotionally loaded terms. Continue reading ‘I’m a “centerprise” architect, no honest, I am!’

It has been a very long time since I did any serious coding, even longer since I coded in Assembler. However, one of the things I wanted to understand was a little about the basic machine architecture. Of course the best way to start on the architecture is by understanding the Assembler language.

I didn’t really need to learn how to program over from scratch, and after poking around came up with another couple of excellent Developerworks resources.

First is the Linux on Power wiki - A great effort that seems to include answers to most questions about running Linux on Power, and really good introduction to the Power 5 architecture. Next, is a 2-part write-up on the Assembly Language for Power by  Jonathan Bartlett a Director and lead developer at New Medio.

Even better, I found that Bartletts “Programming from the ground up” on Assembler programming for Linux is available as a free download in pdf format. So that was interesting set of discoveries, for me at least.